HYPOTHESES IN THE MAKING

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

[Further Note:  Phew, it’s over.  Happy New Years!!]

Earlier in this blog,[1] this writer presented a listing of findings from a Pew Research Center report that offered demographic information comparing the electorate in 1992 and 2016.[2]  The goal was to observe changes the electorate had experienced during the intermittent years.  While that is helpful in understanding the nation’s politics in and of itself, it also suggests reasons for the polarization the nation is experiencing.

          While this posting reviews those changes in summary, the review will spur this writer to offer some hypotheses that will be tested by the information offered by another Pew publication[3] – which will serve as the topic of this blog’s next posting.  But, at minimum, this first Pew offering can stand on its own and provide the reader some insight.

          In terms of ethnicity and race (as a combined factor), the nation has gone through some changes:  non-Hispanic whites make up a smaller percentage of the electorate (by 14% points), Hispanic share has doubled (5% to 9%), blacks increased (10% to 12%), mixed-race grew (1% to 5%), and total non-whites went up (16% to 26%).  Whites’ share of the electorate fell to 60.7% and is projected to be below 50% by 2045.

          Just these limited numbers explain quite a bit and the demographic shifts spell out advantages for the Democratic Party as that party is constituted today.  That is, that party garners the bulk of non-white populations around the country.  Surprisingly, the Pew report states that the Republicans have also gained among these groups but not to the extent that Democrats have.

               In terms of age, the nation is older, and the older set has shifted from being more pro-Democratic to being more pro-Republican.  Americans are better educated and educated people who tended be Republican in ’92, tended to be Democratic in ’16.  When one mixes education with ethnicity/race an interesting change is highlighted, whites with college degrees increased as a proportion of the electorate.  And Democrats with no college dropped significantly (55% to 32%).  Bottom line, Democrats have benefited from changes in educational attainment numbers.

          Then there is the effect of religion on politics.  Those who do not consider themselves as belonging to a religion significantly went up (8% to 21%).  This change seems to have benefited Democrats.  Religious affiliation maintained its numbers among Republicans.  Summarily, Pew observes that Republicans are strong among evangelical Protestants or white Catholics during those twenty years but overall, they account for a smaller portion of the electorate.

          With the easy ability to categorize so many groups according to identity factors such as race, ethnicity, and religion – and to some degree age – with political parties and all that that represents, one can surmise that these factors add to polarization.  And that is the most prominent hypothesis one can make from this information.

          This posting ends with a statement that more specifically captures this hypothesis: 

… [F]or those voters who are concerned over identity issues, the growth of more recent immigrant population – including first generation Americans – less white-based/traditional religiously affiliated people, and an increase in non-religiously affiliated people, life seems to be becoming more secular, less white, and more urban.  In 1992 the US urban population was 76% and in 2016 it was 82% (82.5% in 2019).[4]  Conservative, white, religiously prone people in the US, one can guess, are feeling more and more threatened.

To test these hypothesized relationships, this blog, as stated above, will relate another Pew research report, “Urban, Suburban and Rural Residents’ Views on Key Social and Political Issues,” that Pew issued in 2018.  That will be the topic for the next posting of this blog.

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[1] These findings are reported in the posting, “Some Demographics in Election Years,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog), September 1, 2020.  The reader can see the actual percentage amounts the findings here indicate.

[2] “1.  The Changing Composition of the Political Parties,”  The Pew Research Center (September 13, 2016), accessed August 31, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/1-the-changing-composition-of-the-political-parties/ .

[3] Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, Ruth Igielnik, “2.  Urban, Suburban and Rural Residents’ Views on Key Social and Political Issues, Pew Research Center:  Social and Demographic Trends (May 22, 2018), accessed January 1, 2021, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and-rural-residents-views-on-key-social-and-political-issues/ .

[4] See “Urban Population (% of Total Population) – United States,”  The World Bank, n.d., accessed December 30, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2019&locations=US&start=1978 .

A DIFFERENT CASE ON THE LEFT

 

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 To continue this blog’s look at the national polarized landscape, a Pew Research Center report provides information about the left side of that divide.  The report relates to the 2016 election and basically describes how the left relies on a journalism that has in place well-established structures and processes that guarantee its objectivity.[1]

          Of course, as this blog has just reported, this stands in counter distinction to the right-wing ecosystem that instead of utilizing long-standing protocols to bolster truth-telling, has utilized rhetorical techniques – including memes – that result in dubious news accounts.  This is further enhanced by the relatively unified set of interests its party, the Republican Party, represents.  When everyone tends to see the world through a single lens, those observations are more easily deceived and less demanding of objectivity.

The Republican Party counts on a limited set of groups – businesspeople, fundamentalist religious groups, and disaffected labor groups smarting over the loss of jobs to automation and cheap labor nations – to make up its base.  That naturally leads to allow for a singular, mostly ideological messaging to take hold and bolster existing biases among these people.

The left and its party – the Democratic Party – has instead a wide variety of groups making up its ranks.  This includes from conservative minority-religious groups, e.g., most Jews and fundamentalist blacks, to urban, professional groups such as academics and well-trained technologists.  Of course, these are tendencies, and this account is not meant to describe how all members of these groups vote. 

But to the degree this alignment exists among Democrats, given the proclivity for disagreement among such a high level of diversity, this alliance demands to a greater degree objective news sources.  Therefore, they rely on news outlets having well-established structures and protocols guaranteeing both talent and objectivity in gathering and reporting the news. 

Such an arrangement, though, does not protect those well-established newspapers – e.g., The New York Times and The Washington Post – and national TV news organizations – e.g., CBS and NBC – from being described as FAKE NEWS by the right-wing ecosystem. 

But this reliance on these news outlets allows Democrats and the left to formulate fact-based positions on the vibrant issues of the day.  That arrangement, in a more varied landscape, helps the party to avoid messaging – and accompanying proposals – that appeals to or is demanded by its more extreme members – a faction currently called progressives. 

As for the news organizations themselves, they seek to not be identified as the leftist press and seek to be considered simply the FREE PRESS.  This is backed by their protocols for gathering and reporting the news.  They rely on their audiences to be on the more centrist elements of the electorate both among left and right of center voters and these voter, in turn, make up the vast percentage of the electorate.

And associated with this avoidance of extremism, it also demands that their information sources to avoid exclusively relying on extremists.  They interview all relevant sources, but they keep those sources’ biases revealed to the readers and viewers. 

Central to those endeavors, those source must be treated objectively, and in turn, the news organizations must maintain unbiased methodologies in gathering and reporting their stories and in formulating their editorial positions.  They only revert to withholding information about their sources when those sources will tell their stories only upon being granted anonymity.  In that case, journalists have gone to jail instead of revealing who those sources are.

So, in summary, establishment journalists do not take up ideological positioning in their reporting and try to maintain a balanced perspective about how they present their stories.  On this last point, Ezra Klein describes these journalistic entities as “sources that root their identity in … being antagonistic toward political movements.”[2] 

In other words, the established press strives – not always successfully – to avoid taking sides.  The resulting, achieved balance serves the needs of the left in that that side, as described above and in previous postings, can maintain itself only with a good dose of compromise within its ranks.  Compromise is served by information sources being neutral and believable.

Some might note exceptions to this general description.  Many, mostly on the right, accuse CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and other outlets of being too pro-left in their reporting.  Also, there is some research by academic sources that definitely claims that there is a leftist bias among establishment sources.  One such study is by Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago who published a study back in 2005 using data from the 1990-2003.[3] 

They found Fox News Special Report and The Washington Times as conservative.  They also found Newsweek, The New York Times, Time magazine, CBS Evening News, USA Today, and NBC Nightly News as having a definite leftist bias.  Balanced news outlets included ABC Good Morning America and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Moderately left were CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown, The Washington Post, NPR’s Morning Edition, and ABC WorldNews Tonight.  Not ranked were The Wall Street Journal and talk radio.

While this study is a bit dated and counters the thrust of what this account is claiming, the Groseclose-Milyo study is not judged as debunking the general observations this review has of the current media.  If considered in relative terms – comparing current day right-wing journalism and left-wing journalism – the general judgement expressed here is still considered justified and worthy of mention. 

And this leads one to further consider how the more balanced journalists advance in their profession.  Higher reputations belong to a relatively small number of news organizations and they provide rewards to those considered skilled at being excellent news people.  How?  By hiring them for more lucrative jobs.  One is considered to be at the top of this profession if one has secured a position at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or on one of the national news networks.

So, the basic point here is that the right – in terms of its voters – due to their distinguishing unity, is more open to disreputable sources that one finds on social media and rest of the right-wing ecosystem.  On the other hand, the left is “protected” from such journalism given the nature of the politics that diverse groups demand. 

With diversity, it is more difficult to cull a varied followship with a united rhetorical messaging that social media tends to produce.  The only exception to that difficulty is messaging based on objectified reporting that results in verifiable truth.[4]  The established press come much closer to that standard when compared to the right-wing social media, outlets such as Newsmax, and talk show hosts as Rush Limbaugh.

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[1] Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Library (n.d.), accessed August 19, 2020, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/76a9/3eb0bed8ff032c44186678c5279f20cc5ff8.pdf?_ga=2.230250332.1151241653.1597869609-1463880478.1597869609 .

[2] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020), 236.

[3] Robert J. Barro, “The Liberal Media:  It’s No Myth,” Business Week/Online, June 14, 2004, accessed December 29, 2020, https://scholar.harvard.edu/barro/files/04_0614_liberalmedia_bw.pdf .  Of note, Barro is a founding member of the movement, new classical macroeconomics, that began as a response to the condition of stagflation in the 1970s and is currently an editor-in-chief at Quarterly Journal of Economics, the scholarly journal that published the Groseclose-Milyo study.

[4] This reference to objectified methods should not be confused with the reductionism a scientist practices in a scientific study.  In this form, journalism more resembles responsible historical study by reputable historians.  Journalism is often described informally as the first stab at history.

A RIGHT-WING ECOSYSTEM

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

[Further note:  Merry Christmas to all.]

To further solidify the right of center alliance in the national polarized political landscape there is a “right-wing media ecosystem.”  The public has been given an insight into this ecosystem as a result of various researchers like Robert Faris, et al.[1]  They found that that media group made up of such outlets as Fox News set up two dynamics in 2016 that zeroed-in on the Clinton Foundation.  Picking up a long-standing practice of opposition research, they augmented it to a new level.  It was noted for how deep, well-researched, and how far back it went.

          Of interest, to those who follow such developments, it began before Trump was part of the story.  It seems this turn was initiated with the publication of the book, Clinton Cash, which brought out how the Clintons received speaking fees and donations to the Clinton Foundation for, as the allegation says, policy decisions – when Hillary was secretary of state – or policy proposals.  The book states the Clintons’ wealth ballooned to $130 million and according to its author, Peter Schweizer, was the product of corrupt payoffs.

          Problem is, according to the reportage including a Newsweek review, the book does not provide evidence other than questionable timing.[2]  But this shortcoming did not inhibit Steve Bannon and his Breitbart News from distributing a film version of the book.  All this was strategically timed to be released as the 2016 Democratic Party convention ended and was expecting the usual post-convention bump. 

This was joined with a well-organized email campaign to highlight the release of the film.  And to top it all off, once word began to filter into mainline media, the ecosystem went all out promoting the story and the film.  With this development, that regular media could not ignore the “story” and added it to its list of storylines. 

No one can tell how much harm this whole media blitz did to Clinton’s run for president and the election of Trump – who benefitted and became the center of the ecosystem’s attention.  They, the compilation of effects, legitimized these accusations against Clinton.  A lot of later analysis has discussed the fairness of these activities.  And, in turn, has led to a discussion as to how the mainline media could have – and could in the future – be more aware and more of a supervising entity to avoid such manipulation of the news. 

The main obstacles to policing these moves would be First Amendment rights especially those relating to free speech and even to freedom of the press.  It seems the media, in this case was played to advance dubious charges against the Democratic candidate and, one can argue, probably, along with many other factors, swayed the result of that election. 

Subsequently, questions arose such as who funded Schweizer or what interests backed his efforts and the activities that followed?  Whoever they were, they led to what is called a media ecosystem that survived the 2016 election and is alive and well today.  Perhaps the results of the 2020 election will play as a damper on it, but this writer believes it won’t.

One hopeful result from the 2016 experience is that mainline media and news outlets have learned some lessons.  It is still observed that through Fox and now Newsmax, along with a vibrant right-wing, social media world, right-wing propaganda does not suffer from a lack of eyes and ears.  And it has become noted that foreign governments not friendly to American interests have found ways to infiltrate or otherwise influence what appears on those ecosystem outlets.

Also, out-and-out false messaging has characterized a good deal of what those outlets report.  Misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election, for examples, has been currently part of the mix.  According to recent polling, they have been able to persuade a good number of Americans about not only false information but dangerous information.  According to a Fact Tank article in July,

Most Americans (71%) have heard of a conspiracy theory circulating widely online that alleges that powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.  And a quarter of U.S. adults see at least some truth in it – including 5% who say it is definitely true and 20% who say it is probably true, according to a June Pew Research Center survey.  The share of Americans who see at least some truth to the theory differs by demographics and partisanship.[3]

Along with this belief in a conspiracy, there are significant numbers who don’t even believe there is a pandemic to begin with and a lot of that is due to what people read online. 

Of course, these beliefs can lead to deadly results as they have led to belittling the dangers associated with the virus.  In addition, one can attribute dangerous undermining of the nation’s political, institutionalized processes – e.g., elections – and what Americans decide to believe concerning important national conditions. 

Clever manipulation of messaging – with the use of humor or other meme techniques – has resulted in serious undermining of those national activities successfully taking place.  The most recent example has resulted in the 2020 presidential election results being judged, in sizable quarters, as illegitimate.[4]

The next posting will look at left of center efforts.

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[1] Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Library (n.d.), accessed August 19, 2020, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/76a9/3eb0bed8ff032c44186678c5279f20cc5ff8.pdf?_ga=2.230250332.1151241653.1597869609-1463880478.1597869609 .

[2] Taylor Wofford, “Everything You Need to Know about ‘Clinton Cash,’” Newsweek, May 1, 2015, accessed August 20, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/everything-you-need-know-about-clinton-cash-327694 .

[3] Katherine Schaeffer, “A Look at the Americans Who Believe There Is Some Truth to the Conspiracy Theory That COVID-19 Was Planned, Fact Tank:  News in the Numbers, July 24, 2020, accessed December 23, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/24/a-look-at-the-americans-who-believe-there-is-some-truth-to-the-conspiracy-theory-that-covid-19-was-planned/ .

[4] It seems over 30% of electorate hold doubts or indicate they do not know whether Joe Biden won the election.  This is offset by the majority believing he did win.  See “Most Americans Believe the Election Results – Some Don’t,” NPR, WFSU Public Media, December 9, 2020, accessed December 23, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/09/944685514/most-americans-believe-the-election-results-some-dont.

GROWING DISTINCTIONS

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

When one looks at American political parties and their role in promoting or handling polarized politics, one sees that the Republican Party has experienced meaningful changes in the last decade or so.  Until recently, that party has engaged in rhetoric that utilized coded language to promote policies that favored Anglo identity people – the white majority – at the expense of minority groups. 

It was not necessarily motivated by racist or otherwise bigoted motives.  It instead, to win elections, had to find a way to garner votes when its basic policy positions were formulated to represent a relatively small number of voters.  Until recently, its positioning reflected the economic interests of a minority, businesspeople. 

That minority – especially in the form of larger corporate personnel who shy away from forming alliances with others – hold political aims that run counter to the interest of the larger populated block of potential voters, the working classes.  Whereas there are many more working-class voters then there are businesspeople, those business entities had to conger up issues and accompanying messaging that would cut into those working groups’ support and shift their political allegiance to the Republican Party. 

Identity politics fits that bill.  This process, in effect, was an incubating problem in that under this facade many working class issues went unaddressed by Republican led legislative efforts.  But given the recent developments, those “hidden” messages and their accompanying policies have erupted into the open.

Certain events have served to “out” them, not to lead workers to see the duplicity of Republican policy, but to unmask the racist and xenophobic character of their positioning.  Putting immigrant children in cages, the death of African Americans at the hands of police, and the growing frustrations at the loss of jobs to foreign countries – usually inhabited by people of another race – as well as other developments have brought matters to a boil.  And then there was Trump.  He used the politics of identity to form his base.  And, in turn, he, unintentionally, has also developed his counter base.

In doing so, Trump has gained effective control, at least at the national level, of the Republican Party.  The Democratic Party has evolved into that counter base.  The level of animosity between the two camps has reached dangerous levels.  Where this might end, at the time of this writing, is unknown.  One hears of outrageous possibilities, recently even the possibility of Martial Law was thrown out in the public arena as a way to undo the 2020 presidential election.  January 20^th cannot get here fast enough.

And this leads one to take a close look at how the major parties are constituted in terms of their respective constituencies.  In general, the Republican Party has a far more unified set of supporters while the Democrats can boast a far-ranging array of groups that make up its supporters.  For each, its situations, while different, does have its own set of challenges standing in the way of each party coalescing its voters so as to win elections.

Republicans do attempt to attract followers among businesspeople and the more fundamentalist religious groups.  Both these constituent groups tend to be populated by whites and support conservative policy choices.  That is there is a good deal of overlap between these two groups and, therefore, allows the party to design a fairly unified ideological message.  And, as a result, can go “deep” within its rhetoric to describe and explain what it proposes in a given campaign.

This is not the case with the Democratic Party.  Its supporters range from urban, liberal voters to fairly conservative minority people who have strong religious beliefs.  Prominent in this religious block of supporters are blacks and Latinos/as.  These latter groups cringe at Democratic positions on social issues – e.g., their pro-choice position – but can’t abide by Republican’s anti civil rights proposals.  Consequently, while Republicans tend to be ideological, Democrats tend to be practical in both their policies and rhetoric.

This leads to various differences in the respective strategies each party employs.  For example, in terms of governing, Republicans are less likely to compromise; Democrats are more open to compromise.  This just reflects how much compromising goes on within their respective ranks – Republicans a little bit, Democrats a lot – and tends to set a different mindset in the way politics is viewed within each party.  But of late, Republicans, on this score, have experienced a bit of a shift in their perspective and strategizing.

The instigator of this shift has been Trump and his presidency.  In his more blatant identity messaging, he has promoted higher government deficits – to sustain lower taxes rates – and a larger government, traditionally un-Republican policies.  His base reacts to such policies with “who cares,” and voice their tolerance of such divergence with the satisfaction Trump offers them through his identity politics and rhetoric. 

The main concern has now become preventing illegal immigration and support of current policing policies as they pertain to minority populations.  More generally, the Trump Administration supports policies that advance natural rights’ biases, for example in how that administration has conducted its coronavirus policies.

A JUICED-UP DIVIDE

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

With this posting, this blog will begin addressing directly the extreme polarization of the nation’s political arena.  The nation is divided into two grand alliances in which the populous find themselves supporting one side or the other of various issues they might have never considered important and worthy of their attention, much less their support in the past. 

Why?  Because their side in this polarized landscape support them and they need the support of those who favor whatever particular issues their side favors.  In past postings, this blog has explained how this came about and how it continues to be in effect.  This posting, and the ones that follow, add more substance to what is affecting the continuance of this divide.

To begin, the polarization can be detected by how it manifests itself between the two major political parties.  Now parties have been around almost since the beginning of the republic, but of late their antagonism toward each other has intensified.  For example, a recent Pew study found that party affiliation ranked as a higher indicator of how people felt about various issues concerning the coronavirus crisis than other demographic factors such as race, gender, location (urban vs. rural), and age. 

What seems to be highlighted by that study is how respondents observed the divide between red (Republican) states and blue (Democratic) states and this finding was particularly strident in Western states – mostly red ones – since they seemed highly conscious of this divide.[1]  Some have described this as the interior states being at odds with the east and west coastal states.

In another conception of this divide, long standing ribbing between “city slickers” and “country bumkins” seems to have escalated to open hostility among many who represent one side or the other.  Those red states are generally rural states while blue ones have higher proportions of their populations living in cities.

They are even affecting family relationships and long standing friendships.  And yet an analysis by the journalist Ezra Klein[2] demonstrates how a recent national election did not demonstrate a sudden change in how Americans see ongoing issues – to the extent that voting behavior for one party as opposed to the other reflects such biases or preferences. 

For example, the candidate Trump in 2016 did not garner a greater or lesser percentage of votes from various demographic groups than previous Republican candidates (Romney and McCain).  As reported earlier in this blog, the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, “The 2016 election didn’t look like a glitch, he [Bartels] said.  It looked, for the most part, like every other election we’ve had recently.”[3] 

Of course, no two election turnouts are exactly the same and in 2016 there was a “sharp” move toward Trump among noncollege educated whites in certain states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Klein interprets this move as reflecting the polarized landscape and of these voters’ polarized views, especially among that demographic group, as it reacted to Trump. 

He was, according to American norms, a bizarre candidate and he captured the imaginations one can attach to some identity groups.  Among them is white, noncollege educated men and the voter data seems to support that general linkage.  It also indicates how solidified those attitudes and beliefs are. 

Since then, the election in 2020 – before any extensive analysis has been done – seems to support a continuance of these trends.  The difference is that since 2016, the nation has had four years of a Trump administration.  The actions of that administration – e.g., its treatment of immigrant children at the southern border, the president’s cozying up to authoritarian leaders, his seeking of illegal political assistance from foreign leaders, and the perceived ineffectiveness of the government in meeting the coronavirus pandemic – has created a counter base. 

That is, along with Trump’s base, there is another base dedicated to his defeat at the polls.  That is what happened in 2020.  This writer feels that this later development has not received sufficient attention by the media.  He judges that every time Trump engages in rhetoric, actions, or he issues policy proposals meant to stoke his base, he simultaneously has stoked the anti-Trump base.  And, as it turns out, both sides have been motivated by that stoking to at least go out and vote. 

The average turnout in presidential elections is around 60%.  The turnout in 2020 was 66.2%.  This is a significant increase, and it translates into the most cast votes of all time in American history, for the winning candidate, Joe Biden, which is only seconded by the number of votes for the losing candidate, Trump.  And since then, adding to the bifurcated environment has been the unproven charges that the election was stolen by the Democrats.  Apparently, the Trump base has readily accepted this charge to be true.

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[1] “Republicans, Democrats Move Even Further Apart in Coronavirus Concerns,” Pew Research Center.

[2] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).

[3] Ibid., xi.

A TRUER “AMERICAN CREED”

 

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Recent postings have made a relationship between a sense of identity – how one places oneself in a given group such as a race or an ethnicity or a Yankee fandom – and the polarized politics the nation is experiencing.  The journalist Ezra Klein[1] cites the work of various social scientists that make that connection.  At the center of this association is race.

          There is a long history of such work, but it probably began with the work of Gunnar Myrdal.  His ground-breaking effort, An American Dilemma in 1944, while based on extensive data collected in the South, unfortunately seems to have left an inaccurate account of why blacks were being treated as they were in those states. 

In a few words, that view attributed the maltreatment of African Americans to an inability by vast numbers of Americans to live up to the prevailing beliefs of an American Creed.  That creed has upheld the traditional views liberty, justice, and equality.  The take-away was that Americans were basically a moral people with a moral consciousness but that somehow, what existed was behavior that was contrary to what millions of Americans believed to be moral.

          The solution therefore was for those Americans to just stop behaving as they had been doing.  This oversimplified conclusion has been the subject of extensive criticism.  Center to this criticism are questions about how Americans saw or see themselves.  These critics agree that the problem is not how people, mostly Southerners, don’t live up to their values; but rather, it is based on people having counter values to the American Creed when it came to others. 

That is, many – and not just Southerners, but Northerners and Westerners as well – just did not or do not hold beliefs extending these democratic rights and benefits to those who belong to other racial identities.  In terms of federation theory, what this blogger promotes, Americans in general did ascribe to federated beliefs but only extending them to those who were/are white.  They held on to what this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism. 

Historically, any improvement in the treatment of nonwhite was not the product of redefining federalist ideals, but due to the strengthening of natural rights ideals.  This blog has described how natural rights, in the years after World War II, became the dominant view of governance and politics.  One good consequence of that shift has been the betterment of the treatment of African Americans, but as one can readily see, that improvement has fallen way short of the standards the American Creed established especially in the nation’s founding documents.

What still remains is an ample set of ideals and values that prevailed before the natural rights view took hold, i.e., discriminatory beliefs against nonwhites.  Those anti or non-democratic views are deep-seated among too many Americans.  The remnants of the segregated past still live in the hearts of whites who feel no dissonance in how they view or treat blacks and other nonwhites. 

Instead, there exists a whole view of counter-norms that justify discriminatory practices that still uphold segregation in many aspects of social life, including living arrangements, employment practices, and social gatherings.  Psychologically, people influenced by these counter-norms are able to compartmentalize or re-interpret the American Creed.  Or it is what one might judge to be an extensive rationalization of what is taking place in terms of race relations.

This initial paragraph of an overview article gets at what takes place,

At root, racism is “an ideology of racial domination … in which the presumed biological or cultural superiority of one or more racial groups is used to justify or prescribe the inferior treatment or social position(s) of other racial groups.  Through the process of racialization … perceived patterns of physical difference – such as skin color or eye shape – are used to differentiate groups of people, thereby constituting them as “races”; racialization becomes racism when it involves the hierarchical and socially consequently valuation of racial groups.[2]

These observations of what is taking place are supported by the work of various other social scientists such as Maurice Davie, Ernest Campbell, Hubert M. Blalock and it leads one to understand that the challenge of instituting a true American Creed – true in the fashion Myrdal defined the term – is significantly more difficult than what Myrdal judged the challenge to be. 

Not living up to a standard is dwarfed by the fact that the standard was not held or not held to be moral as originally thought among too many Americans. 

This blog does not see the solution as giving up on the American Creed or its supporting federalist beliefs, but on insisting that those beliefs need to be extended to include fellow citizens whose ancestry goes beyond European origins.  That means, not only turning away from restricting inclusion to non-European based groups and individuals but to also reject radical individualism of the natural rights view with its narcissistic baggage. 

Instead, Americans should extend what David Brooks calls “relationalism”[3] – or what this writer calls liberated federalism.  As this blogger states in his book,

By calling upon civics educators to adopt another perspective, this book asks educators to accept an alternative view of governance and politics.  This other view aligns with the nation’s history but provides an updated version to address its earlier shortcomings and to meet current realities.  This other view can be called liberated federalism.[4]

This language, standing apart, does not communicate the difficulties associated with such a change.  But given how extensive and undeniable the related problems have become, perhaps the nation is disposed to making the necessary changes it needs to make to approach Myrdal’s American Creed.

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[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).

[2] Matthew Clair and Jeffrey S. Denis, “Racism, Sociology of,” Elsevier Ltd., 857, accessed December 15, 2020, https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/deib-explorer/files/sociology_of_racism.pdf .

[3] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House).  This term relates to a related theory in sociological literature.

[4] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementation of National Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020), 16-17 – available through Amazon.